----MYSTERIOUS WAYS~~

---MORE THAN COINCIDENCE~~

--I WAS RELIEVED that the Laundromat in Temple, Oklahoma, was empty that sweltering day in July. With three young children at home who liked to get into all sorts of messes, I had a ton of laundry to do. It was my second trip that week!

Not that I minded. I had always wanted a big family, something I didn't have growing up. Neither of my parents were close to their relatives, and after my dad died, when I was 10 years old, it was just my mom, my sister and me. Then my family seemed to shrink again. Without Dad's income as a farmer, we couldn't support ourselves. At 14, I was put in foster care, and later sent to an orphanage. I lived there until I went off to college.

Even after I met my husband, got married and started a family of my own, I wondered about my relatives. My dad had left behind a steamer trunk full of old pictures, letters and journals that told of ancestors I would never know.

My grandfather had been a circuit-riding preacher, who met his wife, my namesake, Sarah Alice Ritz, at a revival in the small town of Licking, Missouri. Did I still have relatives in Licking? Did they remember my dad? Would they want to meet me?

That day in the Laundromat, while I waited for the wash, I went over to a pile of newspapers to grab one to line my laundry basket with. I wouldn't have taken a second glance at the headlines...if it hadn't been for the title of the publication splashed across the front page: 'Licking News.' It had a funny tag line--"The only paper that gives a lick about Licking." How did a paper from 500 miles away end up here?

I opened it up, my hands shaking. I sensed that there was something in there for me.
I found it a few pages in: a story about the annual 'Ritz-Hadley family reunion, with a picture of the whole clan. I almost forgot about my laundry, rushing home to tell my husband and the kids.

I gave one of the cousins mentioned in the story a call. She invited us to the next reunion. At a boisterous potluck dinner, we met relatives --75 of them--from all corners of the country.

"If we had known where you and your sister were, we would have taken you in," one of them said. "You're part of this family and always will be." grouppray

--Sarah Hudson Pierce
-SHREVEPORT, LOUISIANA.
[GUIDEPOSTS / January 2017]
~~~~~